ASTRONOMY
Part 1: From a Star Chart to a Dog Star
Part 2: An Astrolabe, an Orrery and a Celestial Globe
Part 3: Heads in the Stars
DIVINATION
Wanting to see into the future seems to be built into human nature. The person who knows their future can control it, and become the commander of their destiny. Some of the most prized magical objects have been tools for divination and attempting to see the future. People who are purported to have second sight have been consulted by everyone, from celebrities to shoe sellers.
If you can see the future (and, quite frankly, if you can’t), you’ll have seen that we are about to enter the world of prediction, fortune-telling and the Hogwarts subject of Divination. The practice of divination stretches back thousands of years, and has used natural instruments like bones and turtle shells. More recently, it had a renaissance in the front parlours of Victorian England, using everyday objects like teacups for peering into the future. Some people will use anything to see what fate and fortune holds!
PART 1: FROM RUNES TO ORACLE BONES
So you have chosen to study Divination, the most difficult of all magical arts. I must warn you at the outset that if you do not have the Sight, there is very little I will be able to teach you. Books can take you only so far in this field…’
Professor Trelawney – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
In 19th-century Siam (now Thailand), important life choices were made by consulting a divination manual called a phrommachat. It couldn’t be read by just anyone – it had to be taken to a divination specialist called a Mor Doo to be interpreted.
Because the manuals were used so much, they were often worn out and recopied multiple times, which makes dating their use in history quite difficult. The oldest known copies are from the 18th century, but parts of the manuals were probably adopted when Buddhism was introduced in mainland Southeast Asia, about a thousand years ago. Their Hindu and Chinese elements might date them to even before that.
In a typical phrommachat the paper was concertinaed, and accordingly it was called a folding book. It would have been handwritten in ink and would typically have contained wonderful illustrations of courting couples, big cats and men riding an assortment of animals: chickens, dragons and elephants. The Mor Doo was needed to interpret the multiple belief systems that were merged in the book, requiring both literacy and numeracy to do so.
For Buddhist monks leaving the order, a career as a Mor Doo was a viable way of casting yourself as a lay specialist with access to the necessary secret knowledge the job required. There are links with Hindu and Indian traditions, and the zodiac employed in the manuals is derived from Chinese tradition. Like Southeast Asia and Thailand itself, the manuals reflect a melting pot of traditions and cultures.
When would you consult your Mor Doo? For any difficult decision that had to be made, or for a major life choice, a trip to the Mor Doo was in order: questions might include whether to marry someone, start a business or build a new house, and if so where to build it. Travelling was dangerous back then, so people would even consult on taking trips. Falling ill was seen as a symptom of mental sickness as much as physical. Emotional strains on relationships could all add up to making someone ill, so the Mor Doo consulted on how to sort out issues with relationships in the community. Feelings of guilt and remorse, or any extreme emotions, were thought to make one sick. A divination specialist would tell you exactly what to do.
How the Mor Doo would interpret the book is complex. The twelve animals in the zodiac were combined with five elements: water, fire, earth, wood and metal. And multiplied together, this would give you sixty possible years. To make it more complicated, each of these sixty years was combined with a female or male avatar, or sometimes a different figure, to take it to 120 options. The idea was that you could determine someone’s birth year within the range of 120 years, and if you added the reign of a king, you could hone in on which particular year was mentioned.
Since the minefield of relationships was one of the main reasons why people consulted a Mor Doo, there was even a special relationship section. Matchmaking and checking the future compatibility of two individuals in a relationship (particularly marriage) would warrant seeing the Mor Doo. And not just for the individuals concerned, but both families, too – it was a family affair.
They hurried back down to the Gryffindor common room, which was half-empty, and joined Hermione, who was sitting alone, reading a book called Ancient Runes Made Easy.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Runes were an ancient Germanic writing system – the earliest runic inscriptions date from around 150 AD. As Christianity spread, the characters were replaced by the Latin alphabet. After the early 16th century, runes were no longer in practical use, but their association with magic continues. Famously, The Tales of Beedle the Bard – the children’s book for wizards first mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – was written in runes. The need to interpret runes (and the difficulty in doing so) means they have an air of magic and secret knowledge surrounding them. Even the root of the word ‘rune’ means secrecy. They have come to be very powerful symbols, associated with Odin in Norse mythology.
Some think that runes actually started as symbols of magic and developed into a writing system. They aren’t curved letters like the Latin alphabet, as they were made for carving into hard surfaces, especially wood and even antlers. Antlers also have magical associations, so the combination of runes and antlers is particularly potent.
Antlers grow above the head and so connect the head with a higher power. Stags shed and regrow them, suggesting the powerful symbolism of renewal, rebirth and regeneration. Using antlers to make divination discs with runes inscribed on them would draw on the power of nature in the antler and the rune itself, allowing you to interpret the future or your situation.
The people who were engaging with runes before the Enlightenment (the period during the late 17th and early 18th century in Europe, also known as the Age of Reason) saw magic everywhere. But runes have continued to be used long after the Enlightenment, too. Runes on antler discs were still being made in the late 20th and early 21st century, and have been used by practising witches. They show that magic is still very much part of our culture today.
‘So these are children’s stories?’ asked Hermione, bending again over the runes.
‘Yeah,’ said Ron uncertainly. ‘I mean, that’s just what you hear, you know, that all these old stories came from Beedle. I dunno what they’re like in the original versions.’
‘But I wonder why Dumbledore thought I should read them?’
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
‘I – what – dragons?’ spluttered the Prime Minister.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
For hundreds of years, farmers in Eastern China occasionally dug up bones and bits of turtle shell that had strange writing on them. Until the 19th century they just reburied them, thinking nothing of it. After that, a belief spread that they had magical properties and were referred to as ‘dragon bones’, or ‘oracle bones’. They were ground down and ingested as medicine.
Legend has it that Wang Yirong, the chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing, was ill with malaria and was presented with some whole medicinal bones to aid his recovery. Before they got ground into powder, he saw the unusual markings and recognised them as ancient writing. This might not be true, but in 1899 Yirong was credited with recognising the true significance of the dragon bones.
They are truly ancient: the use of oracle bones predates the three major religions of China (Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism) by almost a thousand years. The discovery of the bones was one of the greatest archaeological finds in history, because it proved there had been an advanced ancient civilisation in China that had a highly developed writing system, called the Shang.
The ancient Shang people were a cult who worshipped the spirits of their ancesto
rs, and they used the oracle bones as a means of communicating with those spirits. These spirits were thought to be highly temperamental (like the Olympian gods), so, according to the Shang people, they weren’t always benign and had to be pacified. They were fawned upon, calmed by ritualistic wines and could wreak havoc upon your fortunes if you stepped out of line.
The Shang kings communicated with their ancestors using a turtle shell or the shoulder blade of an ox. The process of preparing the bones was performed by skilled diviners. The first stage involved cleaning the bones – clearing off the flesh, which could take up to two or three weeks. If you went to the butcher today, trying this on your own might take a month, and there would still be imperfections.
The bones would then be anointed by blood (often perceived as a medium for communicating with the dead), and then turned over to have holes drilled or chiselled into them. On the other side to the holes, the bone was inscribed with information, such as the date and name of the diviner, and most importantly, a question. Communicating with the ancestors could now truly begin.
The questions usually followed a yes or no format. They could range from the profound to the mundane. One example of the latter was a king asking whether the severe toothache he had been suffering from had been caused by the displeasure of a particular ancestral god. To get an answer, it was customary that intense heat (probably in the form of a metal rod) was inserted into the different holes. The heat would cause cracking. The cracks are the ancestors answering the question.
Looking back at the archaeological record, it isn’t easy at first glance to distinguish cracks that appear naturally from those created deliberately, especially on ancient bones and brittle materials like turtle shells. But many of the oracle bones have the actual answer carved on to the front part of the surface where the question was posed, and archaeologists can see the interpretation of the crack in question.
Divination was not for common people. Diviners were esteemed members of the court who worked for the king, and later in the dynasty the king himself became the sole diviner. He was head shaman, political ruler and paramount religious leader. As the only one with access to the ancestors, his word was unquestioned.
The bones and turtle shells weren’t thrown away after use, but carefully stored. The storage of the bones acted as a database, like a cloud-based management system in computing today. As much as they are artefacts of magic and divination, for archaeologists, historians and academics their significance is that they constitute the earliest evidence of an advanced writing system in ancient China. They now pore over fragments of bone and shell that were once used as medicine, and in China, there are even university courses dedicated to them.
In the case of the oracle bones kept at the British Library, rather than dating the bones to within a few centuries, experts were able to date them almost to an exact day. One of the bones documented a lunar eclipse, and an astronomer used a NASA model which allows lunar and solar eclipses to be tracked back through time. Knowing the lunar eclipse could be seen from Anyang, the capital of the Shang dynasty, the astronomer was able to date the bone to 27 December 1192 BC, when the lunar eclipse would have been visible in that location.
Bones that were created to reveal the future, are now revealing the past.
PART 2: CRYSTAL BALLS, POSSESSED MIRRORS AND A FRAGRANT WITCH
‘Where is she?’ Ron said.
A voice came suddenly out of the shadows, a soft, misty sort of voice.
‘Welcome,’ it said. ‘How nice to see you in the physical world at last.’
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
At Hogwarts, Divination was not always held in the greatest esteem, and neither was its teacher, Professor Sybill Trelawney. Many saw Professor Trelawney as a bit of a fraud, especially Hermione. The teacher did have flashes of true clairvoyance, but they often escaped her memory.
‘My name is Professor Trelawney. You may not have seen me before. I find that descending too often into the hustle and bustle of the main school clouds my Inner Eye.’
Professor Sybill Trelawney – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Professor Trelawney herself might not have believed she had the ability to see into the future, but there have been real examples of people who certainly did. Over five hundred years ago in a cave on the banks of the River Nidd in Yorkshire in northern England, a fifteen-year-old girl gave birth. The mother was rumoured to have been subsequently hidden away in a nunnery or to have died in childbirth, but the child survived.
The little girl grew up around the village of Knaresborough and was taunted and mocked because of her strange ways and unconventional looks. She had a bent back, a long and crooked nose, her head was too large and her eyes too wide: the overriding impression was that she looked like a witch. Rejected by society, she retreated to the cave where she was born and studied the forest, making potions from plants and herbs. She made her living by divining the future and acquired a reputation for her extraordinary visions. She became known as Mother Shipton, the Yorkshire Prophetess.
She was said to have warned of the Spanish Armada, to have predicted the great plague in London, to have had visions of vast iron-hulled ships and to have seen the coming of the end of the world. That’s the story, but there is no solid evidence of her existence when she was supposed to have lived in the 16th century, so many think she is just that: a story.
Nonetheless, Mother Shipton became hugely famous. The legends increased in number and spread widely: she could levitate; she could summon goblins; she was born with a full set of teeth and the tusks of a boar; she escaped a courtroom on a dragon; her father was actually the devil…
As well as pubs being named after her and fortune-tellers plying their trade under the gaze of her effigy, since the mid-17th century there have been more than fifty different books written about her and her prophecies. The first books appeared around the time of the English Civil War, eighty years after she was supposed to have died. Mother Shipton Wonders!!! Past, Present, and to come; being the strange prophecies and uncommon predictions of the famous Mother Shipton was published in 1797, with a striking image of her with scroll in hand and finger raised as if in mid-prophecy. It was one of a large number of cheap, pamphlet-type publications that indicate she was a folk figure, and a popular one at that. The image of her with a hooked nose, pointy hat and even a wisp of a beard is typically representative of a witch.
One of the most famous publications about Mother Shipton was written by William Henry Harrison, a bookseller from Brighton, and was released in 1881, three hundred years after she was supposed to have died. It grabbed the public’s imagination, since it supposedly contained a long poem of extra prophecies that Harrison said he’d uncovered from a manuscript in the British Museum. Appearing alongside a number of things that had since come to pass – which Harrison credited as Mother Shipton prophecies – was the idea that the world was about to end. Mother Shipton’s apparent success in predicting the future made this prophecy seem particularly convincing – until Harrison confessed he had made it up.
Mother Shipton lives on in the imagination, though, and books continue to get written about her today. She even has her own statue, luring tourists to Knaresborough with tales of the Yorkshire Prophetess.
Scrying is something you may not have heard of, but it is actually another way of divining the future – the word has its root in the old English word meaning ‘to catch sight of’. Some scry by gazing into the flames of a fire, others the smoke. Some divine the future from peering into the clouds. The famous 16th-century French scryer Nostradamus used a simple bowl of water. Looking at reflections and interpreting the ripples of water was an early form of divination.
A self-proclaimed neo-pagan witch of the 20th century called Cecil Williamson had a witch’s scrying mirror. It is about half a metre high and a quarter of a metre wide, with a frame of dark wood. At the top is the face of a witch with the requisite long, hooked nose, bushy eyebrows, wild hair an
d piercing eyes, all crowned with a witch’s pointy hat. The sides of the mirror look like bony arms and legs.
Williamson was the founder of the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall, and his mirror was one of a quite popular design in the early 20th century. A familiar spirit (a ghost that accompanies you) is supposed to be conjured and only seen in the mirror. If you are unfortunate enough to catch a glimpse of someone standing behind you as you gaze into the mirror, it is imperative that you don’t turn around in case the being persists in front of your eyes. Talk quietly to the figure in the mirror, or close your eyes, but never look behind you!
He whirled around. His heart was pounding far more furiously than when the book had screamed – for he had seen not only himself in the mirror, but a whole crowd of people standing right behind him.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
‘Crystal-gazing is a particularly refined art,’ she said dreamily. ‘I do not expect any of you to See when first you peer into the Orb’s infinite depths. We shall start by practising relaxing the conscious mind and external eyes.’
Professor Trelawney – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
One of the classic symbols of divination is the crystal ball. The art of divination using crystal balls – or crystallomancy – is an ancient practice. As far back as the 1st century AD, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder described druids in Britain using crystals, and in the Renaissance, John Dee (advisor to Queen Elizabeth I) was known to be a practitioner.
The 19th century saw gazing into crystal balls reach a peak of popularity. The writer Charles Dickens was curious, but Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle was absolutely convinced of the powers of crystal balls. Up and down the country, serious practitioners and parlour-room dabblers peered into crystal balls seeking out the future, fascinated by the exotic mysteries of crystallomancy.
A History of Magic- a Journey Through the Hogwarts Curriculum Page 9
